The turnout on Tuesday wasn’t good. So, we’re throwing another test day this week, on Tuesday, July 31st. We could really use your help.

The former prototype event dialog has been promoted to be the new standard event and task dialog for Lightning and Sunbird. The developers are interested in feedback and bug reports of the test community to improve the new dialog. Also, the new Lighting “today pane” has landed, and we need your help testing it and the mail/calendar switch.

You can find all the information on our Test Day wiki page. We look forward to seeing you in #calendar-qa and Litmus on Tuesday, July 31st.

Hi guys,
another two weeks has gone by and I want to keep you informed about the latest new stuff that is going into the tree. No very notable fixes in the last two weeks, so I will move straight ahead to the list of fixed bugs.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

Bug 351745:iMIP bar should ask user what calendar to add invitation to

Next week, we have a regularly scheduled test day. Our alarms seem to have regressed a bit in the last few weeks, so we want to take a critical look at those and determine what specific bugs are there and how to reproduce those bugs. This will give development the direction they need to get them fixed.

Also, several user interface improvements have landed in Lightning, including the new mail/calendar switch and the “today pane”. Join us to check out the new features and find any regressions these massive landings have caused.

As usual you can find all the information on our Test Day wiki page. We look forward to seeing you in #calendar-qa and/or Litmus on Tuesday.

We had a good test day on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone that dropped by and helped with the testing. We managed to narrow down the “remote calendar problems” to two basic issues:

ICS/WebDav: It seems that most of these problems stemmed from incompatible Limit/LimitExcept statements and a change to our code base that causes writes to fail if authentication is required for PUTs but not GETs. This is best summed up in bug 387559

ICS/WebDav and CalDav: There are also proxy issues affecting both clients for these server types. The proxy configuration seems to have been recently broken, with various reports stating that it worked in 0.3.1 and that it did not work in 0.3.1. We need further clarification on this issue. This issue is summed up in bug 373439

We were able to track down the first issue to a specific check-in, and that is now being investigated. However, we need to do the same with the proxy issue. If you have a proxy configuration please try out various Lightning nightly builds and see if you can determine the build where the proxy configuration stopped working.

Hi guys,
another week has gone by and I want to keep you informed about the latest new stuff that is going into the tree. The most notable fix in the last week was the fix for bug 376086, which introduces the multiweek view into Lightning, that all Sunbird users have already known for a long time. The only known limitation at the moment is, that you can only set the number of weeks that should be shown via the preferences dialog. Please help us in testing this and all the other stuff that has gone in lately.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

Bug 262811:When hovering a ToDo item long lines of the description doesn’t break into multiple lines

We have had a startling number of “my events have disappeared!” bugs in the wake of the 0.5 release. Bugs like 381573, 373439, 386197, and 386734. We must figure out what is going on here. Are these all the same issue? Are they several different issues? So, we’re going to have a Remote Calendar test day on Tuesday.

This test day is going to be different because we’re encouraging everyone to get creative with their testing. See if you can help us find out why these events are disappearing. Take a look at Litmus, and see what we tested there, then think about ways to go beyond that. On Tuesday, we’ll be giving an award for the most creative and effective test, so be sure to add your test to the Test Day Wiki page.

We’ve been doing a great job as a QA team, but I think this issue gives us an opportunity to think about how we can improve the quality of Lightning and Sunbird. I don’t believe that the only solution is to quit our day jobs and work on this around the clock (although that might work).

I think we can find ways to work smarter, to do more with the time and the people we have. Maybe we should look into automating some of the testing. Maybe we should look at the weak parts of our Litmus test suite and fix those areas. Maybe we need to delve deeper into performance and memory leak profiling.

We have started this wiki page for brainstorming ways to improve every aspect of calendar QA. We’re going to take your ideas, prioritize them based on what we need the most before 0.7 and put them onto our revised Calendar QA ToDo list.

We will see you on Tuesday. Get creative, bring us your best tests, and prepare to discover where all those events have gone.

Hi guys,
after the 0.5 release we’re not stopping, but are moving full-speed towards the 0.7 release later this year. Already over 30 bugs have been fixed since the 0.5 release came out. The most notable fix was of course the fix for bug 371916 (see a description here). With all the new stuff going in, it would be great if you could help us test all the new features on the next testday, which we’ll announce shortly.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the 0.5 release:

Bug 259234:event start time is greater than end time if negative default duration

Hi guys,
first of all thanks for the massive feedback on our 0.5 release here on the blog, in the forums, newsgroups and on various websites like mozillazine or slashdot. We really appreciate every feedback that we get.

But today I don’t want to talk about the past, but about what’s coming next. A lot of thought has gone into improving the ease-of-use of our application. In the past people have voiced various issues that should be addressed:

If you had a long folder-list, the Lightning agenda would cut off some of the folders and you had to do a lot of scrolling

There were issues, were you could delete a mail, if you had both a mail and a task selected and wanted to delete only the task

Lightning was only really compatible with the “Classic View” layout of Thunderbird. We did not really support the “Wide View” and the “Vertical View” layout

Using other popular extensions like the Contacts Sidebar together with Lightning was a real pain

All of these issues have now been fixed with the patch for bug 371916 going in yesterday. With this patch we separate the mail- and calendar-related functionalities. You can now switch between mail-mode and calendar-mode with an easily accessible toolbar below or on top of your Thunderbird folder list.

Here are two screenshots of the new mail-mode and calendar-mode in action:

Here are some of the major features of this new functionality:

The mode swithcing toolbar can be configured to appear at the bottom (default) or at the top of the Thunderbird folder list

The different modes are offering different toolbars. You can now configure your toolbar in calendar-mode separately from the toolbar in mail-mode

The different toolbars are context-sensitive. So the calendar-mode toolbar only offers calendar-related icons, while the toolbar in mail-mode only offers mail-related icons

As you would expect there are also some areas needing improvements, which we will add in due time:

The state of the calendar view is currently not remembered once you close Thunderbird. It will always startup in week view. This is currently being worked on.

We currently lack the ability to drang and drop mails on the calendar icons or to drag and drop an event on the mail icon. This is currently being worked on.

The mode switching toolbar offers a task icon, which you can add to the toolbar, but clicking on it has no effect. We’re currently working on a separate task view, which you can switch to once it has been finished.

A big thanks goes out to Mickey, who implemented this. I’ve been running a private build with his patch for over a month now and can tell you, that this feature seriously rocks! Stay with us! More good things are yet to come…